1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for managing introspectable objects in an enterprise. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for using perspectives and one or more managed definition objects (MDO's) in order to generate a particular view and process command requests and policies that correspond to the view.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprise administration has become more and more complex due to an enterprise's increasing size. An enterprise may include a multitude of components such as machines, drivers, applications, services, and processes. Each of these components may be designed to interface with a particular management system or console, which results in an overwhelming administration task. In an effort to alleviate some of the complexity of managing an enterprise, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) introduced the Common Information Model (CIM) to standardize the representation of these components. The CIM model allows a user to describe a component in a manner that is not bound to a particular implementation or platform.
With the multitude of components that an enterprise may include, a user may wish to analyze the enterprise using particular views. For example, a user may wish to view the enterprise in a topology tree structure which first sorts the machines, based upon clusters, and then into subnets. A challenge found, however, is that a user is typically limited to viewing an enterprise based upon structures that are hard-coded into the managing console.
In addition, a user may wish to execute particular commands upon a plurality of components. For example, a user may wish to perform the command “show log files” to each component that corresponds to a particular subnet. In another example, a user may wish to “renew IP addresses of each machine in all subnets in all clusters of an organization.” A challenge found is that the user is required to select and execute the command for each component on an individual basis, which may be time consuming and monotonous.
Additionally a user is not able to intuitively define rules that specify how to respond to particular events that a console notifies. For example, if a user observes that a certain machine is infected with a virus, the user may disconnect the machine. In addition, the user may wish to perform the same procedure on each machine that the user manages.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method to provide a user with a plurality of enterprise views and, in turn, process a user's multi-component command requests based upon the user's selected view.